Another ironic fact is that China is doing more to build out infrastructure in impoverished African countries than the rest of the Western world combined. Something to be said for government-run industries run with an iron fist and amoral dedication to economic gain. Thanks to China, Africa stands to advance a lot in the next fifty years without the help of some feel-good charity's hand-outs.

I finish off by invoking Godwin's Law and probably get buried as flamebait.

Not really. If you try to trademark something within the same industry (i.e. as a competitor) and with a name that either conflicts with or at least threatens to dilute your market image through confusing similarities, that's a viable trademark dispute. It's one of the very basic guidelines you have to read up on when figuring out whether or not you have a chance of getting a trademark; it helps to evaluate incidents of prior art. Someone marketing a media device called a Video Pod in the same market sector as Apple's media device, the iPod, looks a lot like trademark dilution to me. You may not like Apple, but they've got grounds to argue here.

Pity about your timing; the iPhone version is finally stable and pretty useful.

Screwing us by outlawing obsolete, wasteful technology? This is an example of the government actually doing something useful, which is stepping in on behalf of the consumer when the free market fails. It will benefit me and my children in the long run to have incadescent lighting replaced by more efficient, cost-effective and environmentally friendly technology.

By your "logic", Flash is so prevalent that almost everyone needs to have it, which is what the original parent was saying. It's Flash's inconsistency, both across sites and across devices, that makes it a problem. Just because a technology is prevalent is not a reason to keep it around. The primary uses for Flash on the web are games and videos. The latter can often be handled better *without* Flash, and the former isn't a viable reason to be dependent on a plugin (you might as well argue that every device should run Windows, because it's the most common gaming platform).

Name one PC manufacturer that doesn't put their logo on their hardware.

Actually, it wasn't a non-answer, you just didn't agree with it.

Good job on the army of straw men, by the way! Very nice. Were you aware that some of them can actually be answered with "you can"? (Two out of four, actually, which makes half of your rhetorical questions useless. I'll leave it to you to figure out which two). Worst of all, none of them actually have anything to do with the original posters' question or answer, unless you count repeating the first question. Without actually answering it. Which I suppose would technically be a "non-answer", wouldn't it?

How did this get rated "insightful" again?

To actually say something on-topic, I actually avoid printing things, too, because it wastes paper. That doesn't mean I wouldn't mind having the option, though, which is one of the reasons why I haven't bought an iPad yet. I vote with my money, and a first-generation Apple product with no front-facing camera and which weighs a ton is definitely on that list of things I'm going to pass on for now. My MacBook Pro and iPhone don't leave much wiggle room for a tablet device.

Your employer has the right to expect you to fulfill the terms of your contract. Typically, this means completing your assigned tasks and staying at work for a specific period of time. If Facebook helps my employees to be more productive, then more power to them.

And if you recycle, you reduce your waste disposal costs, as the city doesn't charge you for recycling. So basically playing by their rules results in saving money and reducing your actual out-of-pocket fees, which is a good thing. The fines are a basic carrot-and-stick methodology, because people tend to act more like children who respond to punishment than adults who can be reasoned with logically.

This article strikes me as a bit far-fetched. I'm curious to see if there's any news of this going anywhere in the future.

BTW, the GRI website is under the confusing name of hoyosgroup.com, and seems a bit fishy. No actual photos of staff (just generic clipart-ish silhouettes), and their claims of being able to capture a person's iris at over fifty feet moving at 1.5m/sec? Really? What kind of camera do they use for that? Just sayin'.

We used to have a nationwide railway system - why not again?

Americans attempting to keep control of oil by military means is a short-term measure; they can't stop other people from buying and using it. The gas prices aren't going to stay cheap forever. You can't shoot economics or the eventual exhaustion of a finite resource. Also, there are many other compelling economic reasons to develop a new railway system that have nothing to do with whether or not people can keep their cars. Even just building out a railway system on a local level in major metropolitans like Los Angeles would be a big boon to reducing gridlock and pollution.

In exactly what parts of the country could people not ride the train even if they wanted to? Those parts without trains?

It seems you may have completely misunderstood my post (and you missed the <sarcasm> tags I kept putting in there at least once); perhaps I was too vague in how I answered. I'll give it my best shot and try to clarify my meaning.

You say that people would set up the servers for us with open standards. They do that now, and many with sophisticated turnkey solutions that completely remove the learning curve from the equation (e.g. squarespace.com) What are you proposing we add that can improve on the open standards we already have?

These services are defeated by Facebook because they're decentralized; people want go to Facebook on the internet in the same way that they go to their favorite bar in real life. They crave a group social aspect that the open-standard model proposed here would find difficult to replace. The reason Facebook is successful is not because everybody's already on it, but because it offers a sense of commonality that people like to snuggle up in like a security blanket. "Separate but equal" doesn't jibe when what people really want is to just be together.

Email is a necessary protocol. It's a fundamental messaging system that it was more pragmatic to open up to an open standard than it was to maintain as a proprietary protocol; companies really had something to lose if they tried to lock their users away from the rest of the world. Comparing the functionality of email to Facebook is, to again use the mundane world example, like comparing sending a letter to somebody versus going to meet them at everyone's favorite hangout. Once again, not a lot in common. While everyone can agree that a basic form of correspondence is a necessity and doesn't necessarily call for a lot of bells and whistles to get the job done, people choose their social scene based on a different set of criteria, where often the more bells and whistles can be offered the better. One of the major drawbacks of open standards is that adding new features can be a long time in coming, and they're often beaten to the punch years ahead by a closed-source solution while the standard is waiting to be finalized (Flash vs. HTML 5, for example).

Okay, this part of your response is a bit confusing. At first glance, and second, it almost seems like you're agreeing with me. You're saying that fragmentation wouldn't be a problem if it was solved, which I think we can all agree with. However, you don't offer any solution to solving it. I agree; there are a lot of problems in this world that wouldn't be so bad if only they could be solved. Saying it doesn't make it go away, though.

Also, you're saying that opening up email led to fragmentation, which is my point exactly, so how is this not a problem? (Just an FYI, email hasn't suffered from any major fragmentation issues since the late nineties, so I think it's fair to say that we can let that one go).

Yes, I know. That was my point. I'm sorry you missed the subtext there. It doesn't solve the problem we have, and adding yet another protocol to solve the problem is only going to add to the confusion, not alleviate the problem.

Okay, that was the sarcasm part; please go back and read it again with the proper inflection. My point was that Linux did nothing to displace the proprietary software platforms out there that it claimed superiority to (and we're talking about platforms here, not software, so the comparison is still valid). I seriously doubt an open standard for social networking is going to be any more successful.

Perhaps this would have been a better analogy if I'd used the obligatory car reference; sorry for having gone outside the box on this one. Better luck next time, huh?

Facebook is great because somebody else has already set up the service and the tools in a way that the 95% of the world that couldn't be bothered to set up their own website don't have to. Also, the fragmentation you mention between Facebook, Twitter and LiveJournal would only become worse with a decentralized standard. We already have it, in fact; it's called the web.

Open source will revolutionize social networking the same way it did desktop computing. We all remember the days of Windows domination, you know, before Linux took over with its thousand-and-one distribution flavors.

This is why I'm incredibly allergic to putting my photos on the web.